One of Faulkners greatest novels, Absalom,
Absalom! recounts the story of Thomas Sutpen, born into a poor farm family
in western Virginia in the early 1800s who runs away with plans to create
a vast design of wealth and power. When he appears in Yoknapatawpha
County, Mississippi (Faulkners apocryphal setting for most of his novels),
he carves out of the wilderness a vast plantation, marries a local shopkeepers
daughter, and settles into the life of a planter when his wife bears him two
children, Henry and Judith. But when Henry brings home Charles Bon, a classmate
from the University of Mississippi, who becomes romantically engaged with
Judith, Sutpens design begins to unravel. On the eve of the Civil War,
Henry spurns his birthright, and together he and Bon leave. It is only after
the war, after Henry and Bon have served together in the same regiment throughout
the war, that one of the central mysteries of the novel emerges: why did Henry
shoot Charles Bon at the gate of Sutpens mansion?

The present-day of the novel is 1909-10 and is
told primarily by contemporaries, including Rosa Coldfield, the fiercely proud
sister of Sutpens wife, a spinster who after her sisters death
spurns Sutpens rude sexual advances; Jason Compson, a confirmed cynic
and nihilist who did not witness the key events befalling the Sutpen family
but heard most of them from his father; Quentin Compson, Jasons son,
a romantic young man who is drawn into the Sutpen saga against his will by
Rosa Coldfield, but once he is involved he must follow it to its logical end;
and Quentins roommate at Harvard, the Canadian Shreve McCannon, who
along with Quentin feels compelled to complete the saga by any means necessary.
These memorable characters not only recount historically factual information
about Sutpens story; they also freely add to it and change it in order
for it to make sense. The novel, then, which is a compelling exploration of
Southern history, race, and gender, is likewise a powerful statement about
how we interpret the past and impart meaning to it. John
B. Padgett

Fresh from a postcollege, intensive five-week
crash course, Johnston began his two-year stint with Teach for America, a
program that addresses the needs of some of Americas most desperate
classrooms. In Johnstons case, its a high school classroom in
Greenville, Miss., with “chalkboards so scratched, rusted, and embedded
with chalk dust that I couldn’t read the boards even if I wrote on them with
fresh white paint.” There he teaches students who have been through
“more funerals than honor roll assemblies” due to drugs and gang
violence. The school systems countless institutional failures (among
them, a counselor who sells high school credits) challenge Johnstons
assurance that education was the “one valuable skill I could bring to
Mississippi that she could use.” The students truancy, sexual
promiscuity and aggression sorely test Johnstons conviction that “underneath,
they were vulnerable still children.” Successes are minuscule
and failure is rampant.

What makes Johnstons account noteworthy is
his ability to move beyond making generalizations about impoverished schools
and students. Rather, he takes readers into the constricted and often doomed
lives of individuals: Corelle catches up on months of work with a six-hour marathon,
but drops out of school; “confident, gracious, and charismatic”
Egina becomes the accidental victim of cross fire. Although Johnston occasionally
catches sight of a “few students who were trying to work effectively,”
they occupy the periphery. “In making the Delta my home,” he observes,
“I found inside her a despair beyond any I could have imagined.”
That compassion, leavened with good sense, makes this honest and often painful
account a moving, memorable call for action. —Copyright 2002 Cahners
Business Information, Inc.

The
Spirit of Retirement: Creating a Life of Meaning and Personal Growth

For some people, the word “retirement”
evokes images of farewell parties, vacations, golf games and, at long last,
real progress on oft-postponed household projects. But according to Autry (Love
and Profit), who once served as the president of a large corporation and
is now a public speaker and consultant, the initial euphoria soon wears off,
leaving the retiree with a hard realization: “For the first time in my
life I dont have a job.” In this compact, inspiring book, Autry
insists that retirement is actually an opportunity for people to “stop
doing and concentrate on being.” To that end, he shares stories about
retirees who made successful transitions to retirement and juxtaposes these
anecdotes with questions and exercises for readers. Retirement is a time for
changing ones approach to life, reinvigorating friendships, serving the
community, finding nature and expressing ones inner creativity, explains
the author, and his book—alternately pragmatic and spiritual—should
serve disillusioned retirees well. —Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information,
Inc.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Welty (The Optimists
Daughter; The Golden Apples; One Writers Beginnings), who died last
year, was a master of the short story, of small town eccentricities, of dialogue
and place and the messiness of human relationships—she was a writers
writer. Now, seven of her essays about the craft of fiction, taken from 1978s
The Eye of the Story, are repackaged together in a little book that marks
a welcome break from the myriad how-to-write-a-novel-in-six-weeks guides and
good-natured but often ineffectual volumes of creative encouragement. In elegant
and insightful investigations, Welty considers Hemingways moralizing,
Virginia Woolfs intellectual use of the senses, the “lowlier angel”
of setting, the problem of polemical, crusading fiction and the novel as “an
illusion come full circle” that “seems to include a good deal of
the whole world.” There is some advice to be had—narrative pleasure
can arise from authorial obstruction, for example—but by and large this
is a book of fond analysis, addressed to the serious reader and dedicated writer.
—Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A guide to the adventures waiting in one of
the richest literary states in America.

By taking the literary traveler on seven preplanned
tours—through the Delta, along Highway 61, to the heart of Faulkners
Yoknapatawpha country, to sites near Interstate 55 and the Natchez Trace, to
the piney woods of East and South Mississippi, and along the sun-struck Gulf
Coast—this book captures the phenomenal abundance and diversity of Mississippi
literature.

More than a guidebook, this book includes capsule
biographies and well over a hundred photographs of writers, their residences,
and their literary environments. It also provides maps and gives explicit directions
to writers homes and other literary sites.

The sheer number of writers discovered, recovered,
and claimed by Mississippi will astonish travelers both from within and from
without the state. Included are not only such major figures in the pantheon
of American literature as William Faulkner, Eudora
Welty, Tennessee Williams,
and Richard Wright but also
the less well-known.

Every nook and cranny of the state claims a piece
of Mississippis literary heritage. Literature pervades Yazoo City, Jackson,
Greenville, Oxford, Natchez, the Gulf Coast, and the Delta Blues country. Willie
Morris, Richard Ford, and
Beverly Lowry have declared that a famous writers presence in their hometowns
convinced them that they too could be writers.

As the locations bring to life the connection of
ordinary rituals with the stuff of fiction, poetry, and memoir, these hands-on
tours make evident the special cross-pollination of writer and community in
Mississippi.

Patti Carr Black is the author of Art in Mississippi,
1720­1980 and The Southern Writers Quiz Book (both published
by the University Press of Mississippi). Marion Barnwell, a fiction writer and
an assistant professor of English at Delta State University, compiled and edited
A Place Called Mississippi (published by the University Press of Mississippi).

Gilchrists most captivating recurring character,
the classy and indomitable Rhoda Manning, starred in many of the best offerings
in Gilchrists altogether splendid Collected Stories (2000). Now
more fascinating than ever at age 65, Rhoda rules this potent new collection,
too, as she reflects on her contentious past, especially her complicated relationships
with her tough and commanding father and her three headstrong sons. Her macho
and assiduous father amassed a fortune selling tractors, abruptly left the “decadent”
South for the clean and godly mountains of Wyoming, then schemed to lure his
clan to his new world. Rhoda finally recognizes how much she resembles her impossible
but righteous father, how much she misses him, and how much they both suffered
over their failure to keep her wily sons away from drugs and other risky escapades.
With Rhoda as her foil, Gilchrist writes with startling clarity about the narcotized
1970s, the wildness of teenagers, and the helplessness of parents.

Another of her intriguing regulars, Nora Jane, headlines
in a superbly suspenseful tale that is set in earthquake-rocked San Francisco
and features a band of Islamic terrorists. A virtuoso in the art of understatement
with a profound sense of place and a flair for sly dialogue, Gilchrist choreographs
unnerving scenarios with a devilish offhandedness.

Acutely observant, wry, and wise, Gilchrist loves
to write about characters who have it all—beauty, wealth, and strong family
ties—and therefore stand to lose so very much. “Nothing human is
easy,” says a woman in one spring-loaded tale, and that says it all.

(Kindergarten-Grade 2) Little Cliff loves to look
at maps and hear about places far away from his small, rural Mississippi town.
His imagination is especially captured by his teachers description of
the Arctic. He begs his great-grandfather to take him there so that he can see
the snow houses, the children riding on sleds pulled by dogs, and people fishing
in the ice. Poppa Joe explains that the few inches on a map can represent a
great distance, shows him a book about the Arctic, and takes him to visit Mr.
Jacob, who shows him photographs of his long-ago trip to Alaska. The next day,
Poppa takes him to the one cold place in town-an icehouse. He puts several live
fish in a bucket and gives Little Cliff a string and hook. “Now you can
fish, jest like them boys in Alaska,” he says. “And youll
be able to tell yore teacher that yore Poppa took you to the cold place after
all.” The warm intergenerational relationships and the encouragement of
intellectual curiosity and imagination are engaging. The ending is humorously
satisfying with Poppas clever solution to the boys desire to go
ice fishing. Lewiss fresh watercolor illustrations are especially effective
in evoking the loving relationship between the dignified African-American Poppa
Joe and his great grandson. This sequel to the earlier “Little Cliff”
titles stands well on its own. —Adele Greenlee, Bethel College, St.
Paul, MN. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.